New Article: Atlanta Sephardic Congregation Or VeShalom Hires an Ashkenazi Conservative Rabbi
David Shasha
Atlanta Sephardic Congregation Or VeShalom Hires an Ashkenazi Conservative Rabbi
Some years ago, I visited the Atlanta Sephardic community over the Passover holiday, and oddly enough found myself leading the Holiday morning services as cantor and giving classes to the members of Congregation Or VeShalom, without any prior notice.
At the time the rabbi of the shul who graciously invited me to teach and lead the prayers was Hayyim Kassorla:
https://www.sephardicbrotherhood.com/or-veshalom
He served there for 15 years:
https://www.orveshalom.org/event/KassorlaKiddush
And he is yet another YU Sephardi:
https://rabbikassorla.wordpress.com/about-2/
I was informed by my host that Kassorla’s Ashkenazi wife Yael (who apparently has since divorced and remarried) was not at all fond of me because of things I had written about the White Jewish Supremacy and Sephardim.
She refused to sit in the same room with me!
It was not an easy week.
Or VeShalom has had a number of rabbis over the past decades.
Indeed, in the game of institutional musical chairs that often takes place in the Sephardic community, it also had Yosef Bitton as rabbi:
Bitton is the proud father of our dear friend Mijal Bitton:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/blWoxt23bvk/m/ZAMDGuYsAgAJ
Sephardic rabbis seem to move around a lot!
But that does not seem to be a problem in Atlanta right now:
https://atlantajewishtimes.timesofisrael.com/sephardic-synagogue-gets-conservative-rabbi/
The shul has moved away from Sephardic tradition and Orthodox tradition at the same time!
Rabbi Josh Hearshen is very good at making the “right” friends:
Although he has most recently been the rabbi of a Conservative synagogue in Tampa, for the past three summers he has served as the rabbi at Camp Ramah Darom, the Conservative facility in the North Georgia mountains, where he says he’s made many friends from Atlanta. Taking up his new position, he says, is “like coming home.”
He says the “right” things too:
I’m on a listening tour right now. I also am doing reading and researching and studying to make sure that I have a firm grasp of the sources and often the different ways that things can be done.
I’m working on the basic premise that I’m not building a synagogue or working at a synagogue for myself. I’m working in a synagogue and building a synagogue for a community. And you have to be the rabbi that their community is looking to have. I’ve entered this job with my eyes wide open and my arms wide open to study and growth and development. And it’s not about my vision. It’s about what our community’s vision is.
Given the lack of even the most basic knowledge of the classical Sephardic heritage in that community, as is the case in most Sephardic communities these days, Hearshen’s academic training will give him a good deal of latitude to hoodwink his membership, as he indicates in the following statement:
There are so many varieties of Sephardic Judaism. They’re all grown up and they’ve been birthed in disparate communities around the world. That’s why there’s a distinct flavor to Moroccan Sephardic Judaism verses Persian Sephardic Judaism verses Bukharan verses Syrian. I think all of these are very different.
So Sephardic Judaism has always been a very adaptable expression of Judaism. And I believe that that makes it very well suited to look forward to how we can change over these coming years and adapt to the world as it is now. And I believe that that is part of the purpose of my having been hired, to help lead them through those changes. I am a non-Sephardic trained rabbi. I have the experience of the non-Sephardic world in ways to help modify or navigate this synagogue as it looks to grow and develop in the coming years.
The key phrase here is “I think all of these are very different.”
Indeed, from this admission we can see that Hearshen has the White Jewish Supremacy thing down cold.
He seems to admit that his qualifications for the job is that he is not Sephardic!
And his view of Sephardim is an adept combination of “Bourekas and Haminados” Sephardischkeit and Ashkenazi racist “Divide and Conquer” supremacy.
He sees the community as needing a way to negotiate Modernity:
One of the major questions from the younger generations is about how our synagogue responds to modernity. There are issues of gender, issues of Shabbat and all those things. And at what speed will we go in making those things happen. And so I think we have a major conversation that’s already begun about what roles women will be playing in the future and how we will get to that decision. There’s a question of how to feel more comfortable in their Jewish lives that are influenced by the non-Jewish world on a daily basis. Those are the questions that will be examined over the coming years.
Indeed, for those who know anything about the Sephardic tradition – and it is unclear what Hearshen knows, or is just pretending to know about it – the statement is very counter-intuitive.
Ashkenazim have accused Sephardim of being too acculturated to the Gentile world, as I indicated in my article on Samson Raphael Hirsch:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1osm0botpWsc_L-yS0ZvOOD-FPmIY75vb7T83BjQI9wE/edit
Hirsch, like his heir Joseph B. Soloveitchik, believed that the Sephardim were too Gentile:
This great man, Maimonides, to whom, and to whom alone, we owe the preservation of practical Judaism to our time, is responsible, because he sought to reconcile Judaism with the difficulties which confronted it from without, instead of developing it creatively from within, for all the good and the evil which bless and afflict the heritage of the father. His peculiar mental tendency was Arabic-Greek, and his conception of the purpose of life the same. He entered into Judaism from without, bringing with him opinions of whose truth he had convinced himself from extraneous sources and — be reconciled. For him, too, self-perfection through the knowledge of truth was the highest aim, the practical he deemed subordinate. For him knowledge of God was the end, not the means; hence he devoted his intellectual powers to speculations upon the essence of Deity, and sought to bind Judaism to the results of his speculative investigations as to postulates of science or faith. The Mizvoth became for him merely ladders, necessary only to conduct to knowledge or to protect against error, this latter often only the temporary and limited error of polytheism. Mishpatim became only rules of prudence, Mitzvoth as well; Chukkim rules of health, teaching right feeling, defending against the transitory errors of the time ; Both ordinances, designed to promote philosophical or other concepts; all this having no foundation in the eternal essence of things, not resulting from their eternal demand on me, or from my eternal purpose and task, no eternal symbolizing of an un- changeable idea, and not inclusive enough to form a basis for the totality of the commandments.
It is really hard to know what the Ashkenazim think about us.
Are we not Jewish enough, or are we too Jewish?
It is really not a very important question to ask, because the Sephardic heritage is basically a dead issue; limited to the kitchen and the musical aspect, as we can clearly see in a new post from Sarah Aroeste:
https://globaljews.org/events/ladino-kabbalat-shabbat/
It is all about the Orientalist Exotic, and not at all about the religious-intellectual literary heritage of Andalusian Spain, the Ottoman Empire, and Modern Middle East.
Here is all you need to know about Sephardic Jews:
- The term “Sephardi” comes from the Hebrew word sepharad, which means Spain. Sephardi Jews trace their lineage back to the period of Jewish life on the Iberian peninsula prior to the expulsion in 1492.
- The Jews of Salonica and other Sephardi Jews don’t use candles when kindling Shabbat lights but rather use oil-based lamps with wicks. They make the blessing without covering their eyes and only then light the lights that usher in Shabbat.
- In the Sephardi tradition, the maqam is a standard melody type and set of related tunes that set the mood for a given Shabbat service. The choice of maqam is set to help enhance the themes of the particular Shabbat readings and ritual meaning.
- The spoken langue of Jews from Salonica and many other Sephardi Jews is Ladino. This unique language is still spoken by some Sephardic Jews around the world but at its height was the daily language of hundreds of thousands of Jews in parts of Europe and the Middle East. Some think of it as an older version of Spanish but it is a unique langue that includes elements of many different languages as well as unique characteristics.
- Once known as the “Jerusalem of the Balkans,” the mediterranean port city of Salonica (Thessaloniki) was once home to the largest Sephardic community in the world. In Ladino, it was called la madre de Israel (“The Mother of Israel”) due to the cultural and religious freedom the Jewish community experienced. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the city became part of Greece in 1912. During the Holocaust, over 90% of the Jewish population was murdered. Today, there are around 1,200 Jews living in Salonica.
It is all tinged with vain nostalgia and the customary ephemerality; acting in a way that depreciates the serious Sephardic culture; aligning with the “Divide and Conquer” approach favored by Hearshen and other White Jewish Supremacists.
There is nothing about cultural erasure, nothing about Ashkenazi racism, nothing about the loss of control of our putative institutions.
Atlanta has swiftly moved from Ashkenazi Modern Orthodoxy to Ashkenazi Conservatism in one easy step.
And in doing so it moves ever further away from the Sephardic heritage; something I understood quite well when I visited Or VeShalom many years ago.
David Shasha